


I Know You Are, But What Am I?

by th_esaurus



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Abuse, Dehumanization, Fucked Up, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 09:21:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1813306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You like your job, Brock?"</p><p>"Sure do, sir."</p><p>"You like your new addition to the team?" Pierce's eyes never narrowed. Always calm and open. "He's a firecracker, wouldn't you say?"</p><p>That wasn't the word he'd use.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know You Are, But What Am I?

Brock Rumlow considered himself a solid man. He wore heavy boots, kept his feet on the ground, had a fierce pride in his job in a way that was unique to military men and stockbrokers. He had good hearing, as a man who walks corridors where secrets are so casually traded must, but wasn't in the habit of running his mouth. People liked him, and he liked to be liked. He had a firm handshake that belied a neat fist; hard punches. He was a solid man; he had people's backs.

 

He'd a long-term girlfriend of four years but turned her lose, grimly but not unkindly, when he took the reigns of the Strike force. A shame. A damn shame.

 

Brock Rumlow knew how to use a weapon. "Let's keep you in the loop," Secretary Pierce told him, with a kind smile and a hand clapped on his shoulder. Another thing about Rumlow; he kept his questions to himself. It didn't do to ask immediately, like a kid; sit on it a while, let the answers present themselves. Patience. Questions were a last resort.

 

He knew how to use a whole host of weaponry, and SHIELD was happy to keep that inventory relevant.

 

Hydra were, too. Of course.

 

*

 

There was a real grace about the beast. Rumlow's tastes were lower than balance bars and ballet, but he appreciated the ways a body moved in combat. Shifting of the weight from ball to heel, an acute awareness of centre of gravity, encyclopedic knowledge of the major arteries, surgical skill with a knife.

 

"He soaks it up like a sponge," Pierce commented.

 

"Ain't half a sight," Rumlow agreed. He thought it beautiful, though that was not a word he was in the habit of voicing. A wisp of black smoke made human formed and given a knife; unmarked bullets. The thing had dark eyes, and that was curious, as it's eyes were blue. Very vivid blue.

 

"We'd like to place him under your command. An arm of the Strike force." Pierce smiled to himself. "Off the books."

 

Rumlow assumed: foreign soil. Wetwork. The kind of espionage SHIELD, officially, did not partake in and abstained from commenting on.

 

He thought about watching that beast tear up a real body, instead of a training dummy. Thought about what a solid man like him would see in the bloody Rorschach blots inked up the walls by a weapon like that.

 

"A pleasure, sir," he said shortly.

 

"You can have his training footage, if you like, for analysis."

 

Rumlow watched it come to a halt, breathless but not heaving. It seemed aware that it's display was over, and that it had been for Rumlow's benefit, and met his stare. There was nothing challenging about it. No glint of defiance, no need for validation. _You impressed, huh? You into that show?_ Just very vivid blue.

 

"No need, sir," Rumlow said.

 

"Keep it in mind," Pierce said. The comment seemed unnecessary.

 

*

 

The target was an activist, Ukranian-born but U.S. based, stirring shit like educated people thought they could. Making waves that bucked across the ocean; pebbles rattled as far in land as Russia.

 

There was a long-standing agreement with the Russians. "They consider him a long term loan," Pierce told him wryly, handing Rumlow a small silver device, about the side of a pager. A kill-switch for the Asset's left arm. Pierce had kept it in the pocket of his suit trousers, casual-like, but Rumlow slotted it carefully into his bandolier. 

 

The target, the Ukranian activist, had a wife and a young son and a history of public disorder, and she was vocal right until a .30 caliber cartridge shredded through her vocal cords. The Asset reloaded calmly, fired another slug through her skull, and didn't bother with reloading a third time.

 

Brock Rumlow had been in the business of killing for quite a few years now. He'd seen bigger men more shook up after taking down a woman from a window three hundred paces out and nearly a quarter mile up. He had also heard about the Asset's reputation with collateral damage. "He'll take out the family as well if you leave him to it," Rollins mutters as the Asset packs up its equipment swiftly, cleanly.

 

"I'll call it," Rumlow answered shortly. He liked his men. Liked to be liked by them. Wouldn't take any of their shit.

 

The son was at school. The wife was, however, at home. They had managed to travel faster than the news.

 

Rumlow drove them back to base in a truck with a steel cage installed in the back; it was just the two of them for this minor cleanup, though, and he nodded for the Asset to sit up top with him.

 

He had always felt good work deserved praise. Nobody respected a hardass. He wanted to tell the Asset that, like with him, he felt there was a pride taken in the work. Wanted to tell it that it had a kind of grace he appreciated. Bloodwork like a Pollock; a nimble elegance like Degas. Rumlow's ex had liked old galleries.

 

"You did good," he said instead, roughly. "Glad to have you on my side."

 

The Asset rolled its heavy gaze over to the driver's seat. Rumlow felt the prickle of it on the side of his neck, in the gritty way his jaw locked; in the heat low in his taut belly. It looked Rumlow up and down, right up and right back down. And then lolled its eyes back towards the road. Of all the effortless in its movement, it seemed like acknowledging something outside of itself, outside of a mission, was a hard, hard ask.

 

Brock Rumlow got them back to base, and Alexander Pierce was there to greet them. Was there to take the weight of the weapon off his shoulders.

 

*

 

He was out with Captain Rogers when he got the call.

 

Now, Rumlow respected the Captain a great deal. He was a proud man, and that was a sin Rumlow could appreciate. He wasn't a drinker but went to bars with the fellas after a tough debrief; he had wide smiles for guys his shield had saved from headshots, and bought beer as an apology for a girl he'd knocked in the back of the head – she'd crumpled, and missed the bullet aimed at her eye socket. Her comms had been down. Couldn't hear Rumlow's order to hit the deck. So the Cap helped her hit it.

 

Objectively, he was a good-looking guy. Solid. Well-built. Rumlow'd had a girlfriend for the last four years, sure, but he'd had guys before that.

 

The Cap knew this.

 

There were a whole lot of things he didn't know.

 

"Stay for another?" Rogers asked amicably, his wide hand on Rumlow's back.

 

"Business," Rumlow replied, and he gave an uncommon smile to clear up the Cap's clouded up expression. "Nothin' serious. We'll catch up on Thursday."

 

Rogers nodded him a little salute.

 

He was a good man, deserved respect. Had a strong sense of duty. As did Brock Rumlow. He was going to make a good agent, someday soon.

 

They must have called in Secretary Pierce at the same time as Rumlow.

 

There was blood on the floor, two little pock-marks of it, spat up by a mouth, not a bullet wound. A few inches away from the blood, a roughly severed index finger. It had rolled aside with the force of the spit, and oozed onto the floor.

 

The Asset was panting, its shoulders heaving like a dying hound. Its mouth was open, teeth bloody, of course. They were dragging out the poor bastard who'd got too close as Rumlow arrived.

 

There were four armed men in the room, and Pierce bade them all leave with a terse head shake. He had no weapon on him, no Kevlar, and his bones were brittle enough to snap under the Asset's flesh grip, let alone the vice of its steel hand. Rumlow put his pistol in his hand, and the click of the safety was more than enough to catch the Asset's frantic interest.

 

"Don't be an idiot," Pierce told him. Rumlow did not appreciate the scolding. "Put it away. Three paces back, please."

 

Brock Rumlow had given a lot of orders the past few years, but spent plenty of time in the decade before that acclimatising to taking them. He holstered his gun and kept his chin up as he stepped backwards. The Asset looked only at where he had been, and then at Pierce.

 

In his early military days, men had stood two inches from Rumlow's face and hollered at him that he was about to be taught a valuable fucking life lesson so he'd better be paying a-goddamn-ttention. Secretary Pierce did the same thing with a small, smiling, backward glance.

 

He had a pocket-square in his crisp suit. He'd come from the Triskelion, a day at the office. Rumlow could never stick that paperwork side of it all, delegated as much as possible. He communicated better in clipped sentences more than the written word. But Pierce was elegant in all forms. Even when he was silent.

 

He took the baby blue handkerchief out of his pocket, and took off his jacket, and knelt between the Asset's open legs, looking up at it with a very soft sort of expression. The Asset just bit a man's finger clean off, and Pierce was putting his face within spitting distance.

 

Christ, but there was feral beauty in its power.

 

Rumlow watched the way its shoulders quit heaving, slowly, slowly, as Pierce wiped at its mouth with his handkerchief. His lips were moving but whatever sweet nothings he was whispering were inaudible. He put his hand gently on the Asset's thigh, leaned in. His hand was high up on its thigh.

 

The Asset nodded at something Pierce said.

 

It had never nodded when Rumlow had briefed it in. Understanding had to be assumed. He trusted the beast to get the job done and had never been let down; still, something in him coveted that acknowledgement.

 

He made a _tschh_ noise to himself, and turned away. Pierce folded the bloody handkerchief haphazardly and put it back in his pocket. He put his hand on Rumlow's shoulder as he made his way out of the room.

 

"You'd keep a rifle clean, of course," he said pleasantly. "It's nothing a good soldier wouldn't do."

 

*

 

Secretary Alexander Pierce invited Rumlow to dinner. "On the house," he said, on his voicemail.

 

Rumlow never dressed flash. He rose the ranks of SHIELD but he always considered himself one of the boys. Beer instead of wine, soft rock and a little trance music when he was in the mood, movie nights where a handful of fellas from work could come over and crow about the shit they put in action flicks these days. He booked a table at the same restaurant three years running for him and his ex's anniversary.

 

He fit good in his uniform, was the thing. Appreciated the days when he stopped having to wear heavy camo.

 

He wore that same anniversary suit for his evening with Pierce.

 

"You appreciate fine things," Pierce told him, and he wasn't talking about the entrees. "I'm not as young as I was, of course."

 

Rumlow shrugged, awkward with the stiffness of his jacket around the shoulders. "You got a few years in you yet, Mister Secretary."

 

Pierce barked out a laugh, ate his food delicately. Buttery scallops, rocket, asparagus. Rumlow had gone for the steak.

 

"You like your job, Brock?"

 

"Sure do, sir."

 

"You like your new addition to the team?" Pierce's eyes never narrowed. Always calm and open. "He's a firecracker, wouldn't you say?"

 

That wasn't the word he'd use.

 

"He's been in this business longer than you can care to conceive of," Pierce said, rather softly, sipping his wine. "I've known him for a good many years."

 

As though anyone could ever know that thing.

 

And then Pierce said: "It's funny, military men will put up with all the trite orders in the world under the banner, but they'll rebel the minute they're out of uniform. Not so with him, I've found. Frame it as a mission, and he'll do anything you like."

 

He said it so lightly.

 

Rumlow shook his head when the waiter offered them a dessert menu. He took a cab home, and and for the first time in a while, brought himself off in the shower thinking about someone specific. Something specific. The Asset's nimble hands, heavy eyes. Nothing more imaginative than that. Just the vague, violent shape of it as Rumlow jerked himself off under the water.

 

*

 

There were a few quiet months.

 

Brock Rumlow ran standard missions, extractions and intel, and liked it when Captain Rogers was his wingman. Rumlow sat in on his hand-to-hand combat training sometimes, liked the slap his wide palms made when they hit skin, the clunk of his solid boots as they thwacked down on the training dummies.

 

"It's invigorating," he'd say, sweating and grinning. "You don't wanna try?"

 

Rumlow smirked back. "Yeah, they told me all that bullshit about the body being a weapon, too, but I like the weight of a gun in my hands, y'know?"

 

He rarely said a string of so many words.

 

Rogers brought out the best in people.

 

The Asset, at this time, was on ice. He'd never felt the need to ask about the necessity of it. There was little use for distrust, as a concept, in an already flawed world. It was simply the default; why bother voicing it?

 

So the Asset was on ice when an Italian cabal of scientists began to whisper, strictly under the table and ever so _sotte voce_ , that they were close to developing a self-renewing energy source clean enough to rival Stark's fabled arc technology.

 

Stark, he knew, could run around with his vanity projects because no matter how many times he boldly announced that weapons weren't his trade, he still made them. Under the guise of saving the world.

 

There was very little money in renewable energy. Very few land wars over it. Rumlow didn't know the exact politics of it all. He knew, however, that the science behind it was held mainly in the heads of three physicists who were too excitable to keep their mouths entirely shut.

 

Freely shared knowledge was not a commodity.

 

"Don't make a big fuss about it," Pierce said to him. Just a casual conversation in a SHIELD corridor. "He'll need a day or two to re-acclimatise, but we don't have that luxury. Get him out, get it done."

 

"You need to be there when he comes off the ice?" Rumlow asked.

 

Pierce put his hands in his pockets. Were he the sort of man to carry loose change, he might have jingled it. Rumlow couldn't see a single bead of sweat on the man.

 

"He'll expect me." Rumlow had scene it one time before. The Asset shaking and vomiting and dripping ice water from the rank strands of his dark hair. Everyone pressed around the perimeter of the room except Alexander Pierce.

 

"Take care of it," Pierce murmured.

 

The huge cryochamber was already being hosed down and warmed up by the time Rumlow arrived, and a heavily fortified chair was wheeled in front of the iron door. Rumlow had called in three of his top men, a handful of technicians who were on an anonymous payroll. One of them grabbed his arm as he approached, then looked like he'd thought better of it. "Secretary Pierce—"

 

"Got better things to do with his time," Rumlow said, flat and calm. "Speed it up."

 

He'd been told no trigger phrase that calmed the Asset down, and he didn't know what it was Pierce always said to it to halt the heave of its wet chest. There was something grossly embryonic about this loose-limbed, naked beast, cowering in a chair, not even aware enough to scrape the hair back out of its eyes. It scratched feebly at its metal arm, unable to comprehend it as part of its own body.

 

"Hey," Rumlow said, trying to be soft. "Hey. Stop it. That's an order, now."

 

Its head pricked up at the words. It seemed to loll a little, like its skull was too heavy for its neck. It was like watching a cheetah drowning. All that strength and skill and speed come to naught.

 

"Gotta pick up the pace for this one, all right?" he said, coming close. He thought about putting his hand on its thigh. Pierce did that. He went for the jaw instead, touched it there. Its skin was sticky and dank from the cryo, and its eyes refused to focus on him. "Look at me."

 

There. Focus.

 

"Good. That's real good."

 

Its head lolled to the side again, and Rumlow held it upright with his palm. He put his thumb against the Asset's lips, just in the corner, pressed there. They parted for him almost instantly.

 

"You gonna bite it off?" Rumlow asked, kind of curious. "Or you gonna do what I tell you do and suck on it?"

 

There was a deep pause. It breathed so heavily. Rumlow wondered what it knew. Whether it knew where it was, who it was, what was expected of it, what had come before; what would come after.

 

But he didn't wonder all that hard. It wasn't exactly relevant.

 

The Asset rolled its shoulders back and closed its eyes and suckled Rumlow's thumb into its slack mouth.

 

He had never clearly seen what Pierce did, after all, when they woke it up.

 

Rumlow pulled his hand back, not roughly enough to startle. He wiped his thumb on his pants. "Give the order," he said to the room at large, and things happened on his command. He could hear them describing the detail in clipped Russian as he left the room.

 

The Asset shook a little on the flight out to Italy.

 

The job got done.

 

*

 

There never seemed to be any two safehouses alike. Guns, food, maps – all interchangeable, none of them ever a given. This one had a tangle of cables hooked up to an old-school telephone receiver, an encoded number scribbled in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, made to look like a love poem.

 

Rumlow dialed, waited for the sound of breathing on the other end. "Strike Alpha in final position," he said shortly. "Awaiting extraction. The weapon's with me."

 

He hung up.

 

The Asset was watching him steadily from the corner of the room. Nobody had bothered to keep this place up. The carpets were bloodstained here and there, the furniture old, drool marks on the pale cushions where teams had slept anywhere they could. The Asset leant up against a discoloured rectangle on the wall where maybe there'd once been a TV.

 

"These places always gotta have a damn shower," Rumlow muttered. He found himself in the habit of talking to the Asset when they were working together. His ex had talked back a lot, answered rhetorical questions. The Asset never answered anything. It wasn't unpleasant.

 

He didn't mind turning his back to the beast, either. Hunted down the small corridor for a bathroom. Broken showerhead, mould on the ceiling. But the faucet worked okay.

 

He ran a bath.

 

The Asset hadn't moved from its spot. It hadn't been told to.

 

Rumlow had patched his men up in the field before. Had the same basic medical knowledge that all soldiers did, carried clean water to wash bullet wounds, sticks and cloth for splints and slings. Actually, he'd dug a bullet out of Steve Rogers' bicep with a flick-knife once, but Rogers had just grimaced and said, "It'll look after itself, see to the others, okay?"

 

"Get in here," he told the Asset. He spoke roughly, but that's just the sort of guy he was. Didn't mean anything crude by it. "You hit anywhere?"

 

No reply.

 

"Point it out. Show me."

 

Still nothing, but the Asset looked at him.

 

"Strip down," Rumlow ordered. He still wanted to check. Didn't know if the Asset was like Steve Rogers. Self-healing or just stubborn.

 

He was used to good-natured griping and sass when his boys were hurt. The Asset just methodically stripped out of its uniform and stood bare, bleeding from the left calf. They'd crouched and walked four miles to the safehouse, and it had never limped once.

 

The bullet had gone right through its shin and out the other side, clean at least. Nothing to do but bandage the wound and wash him down.

 

Rumlow'd had a fling with a big guy, once, a couple weeks of fooling around. A soldier, like him, but content to sit low in the ranks and have fun. No ambition. He had a military mindset, and liked Rumlow to tell him how well he'd done in bed. Rumlow found it in poor taste, on the whole.

 

Praise should be freely given for a job well done, he thought. No point throwing it around like free booze at a frat party. No joy in it, then. No satisfaction.

 

"This ain't mean I'm mad at you," Rumlow told the Asset. He tied off the bandage and nodded towards the quarter-filled bath. It stepped in gracefully, not flinching when all the weight landed on its left leg. "Happens in the line of duty. Doesn't mean you did badly."

 

He perched on the edge of the bath. No sponge, no towel, nothing he'd trust in this dank room anyway, so he pulled off his bandolier, his body armour, and balled up the tanktop underneath. Dipped it in the tepid water. Scrubbed around the bandage.

 

He knew there were men who cleaned the Asset down after missions. Men who shaved him, dressed him, undressed him. He could do it all by his own damn self.

 

But Brock Rumlow could see the pleasure in it. In a weapon that needed to be primed and cocked before it could shoot to kill.

 

A gun, of course, never asked to be told it had done good.

 

He put his hand on the Asset's thigh. Didn't leave it there long, like Pierce often did.

 

Instead, he took its soft dick in his fingers. His grip wasn't too firm. He wasn't trying to make a statement here. Just jerked it neatly, efficiently. Took a while for the thing to start getting hard.

 

"—Is this a test?"

 

Rumlow's hand slipped off in surprise. He shook it out like he was scalded. The voice sounded so thin and underused. It should've been strong: thick neck, built up chest, but a thin little twig of a voice.

 

"No. Ain't a test."

 

The Asset frowned down at him. Carried on frowning while Rumlow worked its dick fully hard.

 

He left it in that state. Left it standing erect, with the wet balled up tee slapped over its shoulder in case it wanted to finish washing. It could do these things on its own. If it were inclined to.

 

Rumlow didn't wash his hand, and found the shit bedroom in this decrepit safehouse, and unzipped his fly, and thrust into his palm until he came. Didn't take that long, and didn't feel all that good.

 

When the extraction team arrived, they dressed the Asset back in its uniform, and bundled them both out to give Secretary Pierce his full mission report.

 

*

 

He couldn't clear a room with a nod, not yet, but a brisk, "Empty it," was enough to do the job.

 

A Ugandan minister was dead, and they were putting the Asset back on ice. Drugs all laid out on the table in sleek syringes to slow its heartbeat, cool its bones, clean its slate. They hadn't yet been administered, and Rumlow wouldn't know where to start with it.

 

Instead, he leant back against the wall, his arms crossed, looked at the beast in its cage of a chair, and tried to see what Alexander Pierce saw in his Asset.

 

An ideology. A tool to change the world, maybe. An iron fist that metered out brutality and death before Pierce and his diplomats waded in to soothe the hurt. And then what would become of him? What good was the idle threat of a machine gun? You gotta mean something by it.

 

A tool with a swiftly diminishing shelf life.

 

Rumlow looked at it and saw a gun. He'd been around them his whole life, handled them well. Guns didn't talk back like soldiers sometimes did. Didn't complain when you wrenched them apart and strung them back together five times a day.

 

"You feel good when you kill people?" He asked out loud.

 

The Asset rolled its gaze over to him, heavy as a bowling ball, like always. He didn't answer. Answering pointless questions wasn't part of his design. It wasn't Rumlow's habit to ask them, either, until he could be sure he wouldn't get an equally pointless response.

 

Not a single muscle in the Asset's firm body tensed as Rumlow approached.

 

He'd had a girlfriend. Four years. She complained about going down on him after two. Said he shouldn't ask her for it, but be grateful if she wanted to. He liked her face, but not so much her mouth, in a lot of ways. He'd still let her go gently, though. He didn't like to leave people with grudges.

 

Brock Rumlow unzipped his fly as he walked. The Asset looked at his face, not his hands at his crotch. The room was sterile, syringes and surgical equipment, but it didn't take him that long to get hard when he palmed at his dick. The Asset was fully dressed, pale where it hadn't really seen sun in seventy-some years, and very vivid blue eyes.

 

"Breathe through your mouth," Rumlow said. Not even a split-second between the order and the obedience to it.

 

He'd said that to get its mouth open. The path of least resistance.

 

Rumlow stood next to the chair and got his dick out, and put the head of it on the Asset's bottom lip. A man had lost a finger between those teeth. A great many men and woman had lost more than that under its mismatched hands.

 

"If I tell you to enjoy it, would you enjoy it?" Rumlow asked, low.

 

The Asset said nothing. Enjoyment was not a requirement of its existence.

 

Rumlow pushed in. Grunted a little, almost at once. Felt good, it felt good, and the Asset's lips let him in so easily. No sense of the morality of the act. No right and wrong; just the ability to do what was asked of it. The perfect soldier. The perfect weapon.

 

Brock Rumlow fucked into its mouth, and pulled its head back when he was close to coming, and came on its parted lips and slack tongue.

 

"Christ," he muttered. "Fuck."

 

He had nothing to clean it up with. Scrubbed its mouth pink with the heel of his palm, and then wiped that on the inside of his trouser pocket. Wished he had a handkerchief or something. He felt fucking compromised.

 

When he called everyone back into the room to get on with it, he found Secretary Pierce waiting outside. Smiling quite pleasantly.

 

"You can take me outta the loop now," Rumlow muttered, rarely rude to his superiors unless he really meant it.

 

"Yes," Pierce agreed, a low murmur. Still smiling. "Yes, I rather think you've had enough now, don't you?"

 


End file.
